Greece sets off Turin Winter Olympics torch relay

ANCIENT OLYMPIA (Greece)—The Olympic Flame torch relay of the Turin 2006 Winter Games has set out in the hands of a Greek 19-year-old pole vault champion, embarking on a three-month journey from Ancient Olympia to Athens, Rome and northern Italy.
Dressed in the white-and-orange uniform of the 2006 Winter Games, Costas Filippidis became the first of 10,535 torchbearers in a relay exceeding 13,300 kilometres (8,264 miles), and expected to feature Italian designer Giorgio Armani, legendary gymnast Juri Chechi, Formula One driver Jarno Trulli and Pope Benedict XVI’s Vatican Swiss Guard.
Overcast skies — and a rain forecast for Sunday — prevented Greek organisers from fully carrying out a ritual ceremony involving actresses in the garb of ancient priestesses in Olympia, southwestern Greece, where the Olympics were born in 776 BC.
The priestesses were to use a polished concave mirror to capture the sun’s rays inside the Temple of Hera, patron of marriage and the senior goddess of the ancient Greek pantheon.
Instead, Filippidis lit the sledgetip-shaped torch of the February 10-26 Turin Games with fire sparked by high priestess Theodora Siarkou during Saturday’s successful dress rehearsal.
The flame had likewise failed to light at the designated moment for the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games.
“Every two years, the entire world turns to Olympia to renew the miracle of a flame that moves from city to city, announcing that soon there will be 16 days of pure sports and competition,” said Valentino Castellani, chairman of the Turin Games organising committee (TOROC).
Moments later, Siarkou and 17 other priestesses emerged from the hills overlooking the Ancient Olympia archaeological site, and into a cypress grove dedicated to Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin — founder of the modern Olympics — with an archaic-style vessel containing the sacred flame of the Games.
The Olympic flame will symbolically cover 2,006 kilometres (1,246 miles) on Greek soil during 10 days.
It will visit eight ski centres across Greece before arriving in Athens’ all-marble Panathenaic Stadium — site of the 1896 first modern Olympics — on December 6, to be handed over to Turin organisers.
Two Winter Games medalists who are now members of the International Olympic Committee will be among the relay runners, along with fellow Greek Olympic Committee (HOC) member Lambis Nikolaou, who will run on Sunday evening.
“Whether male or female, young or old, able-bodied or with a disability, high-level athlete or amateur, the flame will unite us all,” said Nikolaou, conveying a message from IOC president Jacques Rogge.
Japan’s Chiharu Igaya, a participant in three Winter Games and a slalom silver medalist in 1956, will cross the 2.2-kilometre Rio-Antirrio bridge connecting to mainland Greece on November 28.
Sweden’s 1992 giant slalom gold medalist Pernilla Wiberg, a four-time Olympian, is to light an Olympic altar at the ski centre of Tria Pente Pigadia in northwestern Greece on December 2.
Turin 2006 organisers will subsequently fly the flame on a C-130J military transport plane to Rome, where the second leg of the relay will start at the Piazza del Quirinale on December 7.
The Olympic flame will tour 140 Italian cities before arriving at Turin’s Stadio Communale for the opening ceremony of the Games on February 10, 2006.
Relay legs will also run in Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, San Marino and France, where the flame will visit the former Winter Olympic cities of Grenoble (1968) and Albertville (1992).—Agencies